


Vault + Money + Air

by slightly_ajar



Series: Domesticities [7]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-10 00:23:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20518925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightly_ajar/pseuds/slightly_ajar
Summary: A mission goes sideways leaving Mac trapped in bank vault.  As the air runs out and he has nothing else to do but wait and think and remember.





	Vault + Money + Air

_The book of love has music in it, in fact that’s where music comes from, some of it’s just transcendental, some of it’s just really dumb – The Book of Love, Peter Gabriel._

  


It had seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Mac led the thieves away from the bank’s lobby while Riley and Desi evacuated the innocent bystanders. That wasn’t how the mission was supposed to have gone, but when did missions ever go the way they were supposed to? 

Mac sprinted through the tastefully decorated halls of the bank with the bad guys close behind him, throwing his improvised flash-bang grenade over his shoulder as he neared the open door of the safe. His plan was that the explosion would stun the trio chasing him while he was protected from the detonation inside the safe, then he would step out of the vault like a conquering hero to arrange for their transportation to prison. 

Except that’s not what happened. 

Either one of the bad guys shot at the grenade to try and alter it’s path, one of them shot at Mac and hit the grenade accidently or the universe conspired against Mac just because it could because instead of going flash-bang – like, being a flash-bang grenade, it was supposed to - the flash-bang grenade went KA-BOOM! 

Fire roared. Smoke billowed. Masonry crumbled. And the safe door became very firmly closed. 

Mac was locked in. 

“Money makes the world go round, the world go round, the world go round.” Mac sang to himself as he stared at the locked door. 

He’d pushed, he’d pulled, he’d pried, but the safe wouldn’t open. Mac walked up and down the vault carefully examining everything he could see but there was nothing he could use to get the door open from the inside. He was going to have to wait until someone opened it for him. His friends were outside and Mac was confident they would find a way to reach him, the problem was that the safe wasn’t large and it wasn’t ventilated. If his friends didn’t get to him soon Mac was in very real danger of suffocating. 

When the bank’s manager had shown them the vault earlier that morning Desi had given an impressed whistle as she’d walked around the small space. “That’s enough for me,” she’d said as she nodded at the pallet full of money standing against the wall then grinned at Mac and Riley, “what are you guys having?” 

She’d walked out to the lobby to take up her position singing, “Money money money money, money money money money, get a little, get a little, money money money money…” as she went. 

“That clinking, clanking sound,” Mac sang absently to himself, stretching out his legs to be more comfortable on the cold marble floor he was sat on, “can make the world go round.” 

The money in his hand didn’t clink or clank - it folded. The cash on pallet next to made him a millionaire. There was enough wealth beside him for him to to be able to retire. He could travel, invest in green energy and send his dad to one of the expensive cancer treatment clinics he’d found. If he could find a way to open the locked door in front of him. If he was still breathing when his friends finally reached him. 

Part of his brain had been busy calculating how much air the safe held and how long it would be until the levels of carbon dioxide verses oxygen in the room became uncomfortable, hazardous then lethal. The rest of his brain was working hard at ignoring those figures because no good would come from dwelling on them. The numbers would only make him panic. 

Which would make him breathe faster than normal. 

Which would use up the oxygen in the room quickly. 

Which he couldn’t afford to do. 

He didn’t know how long he’d been trapped. He didn’t have Jack’s trick of measuring time with facial hair but he didn’t think it had been for more than a few hours, even though it felt like days had passed since he’d slammed the safe door closed. He did know that he’d been locked away long enough to make thirty seven origami cranes out of hundred dollar bills and for a headache to form behind his eyes. 

Mac squinted at the paper birds in front of him. Was it thirty seven cranes or thirty six? 

An ancient Japanese legend said that anyone who created one thousand origami cranes would be granted a wish, and while Mac didn’t think he’d manage to fold that many birds in the time he had left before the bad air around him made him slip into unconsciousness, that was no reason to stop trying. It gave him something to do with his hands and distracted him from the way his breath was hitching at the top of each inhale. 

One hundred dollar bills were the wrong shape to make origami with so the cranes were all lop sided and lumpy but Mac found he didn’t mind. Their aberrant shapes fit the circumstances, they felt appropriate. Improvised. 

Maybe it was thirty eight cranes, Mac blinked at the blurry, shifting shapes, and felt himself drift. 

  


“Nacho, nacho man, I want to be, a nacho man.” Jack sang while backing though Mac and Bozer’s front door with a shuffling dance move he liked to call The Reverse Jagger. “Nacho, nacho man…”

“Did anyone at the bar even sing Macho Man?” Leanna asked as she watched Jack shimmy past Mac’s polar bear and around the hall. She put a hand on Bozer’s shoulder and leaned her weight against him while she took off her high heels. 

“No.” Mac replied as Riley and Matty followed him into the house. “But that doesn’t matter. Don’t expect logic to influence Jack’s thought process.” 

“I’m going with the flow, man.” Jack said as he drew the index and forefinger of his right hand held out to form a V in the style of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction in front of his eyes. “You follow where the music takes you. Nacho, nacho man…”

“Well, the music has been taking you to ‘Nacho Man’ land for the past fifteen minutes,” Bozer groused, “do you think if I make you some nachos you might be able to find some closure with that song and move onto something else?” 

“It can’t hurt to try, Boze.” 

“All right then.” Bozer headed to the kitchen with Leanna at his side. 

“Nacho, nacho man…” 

Mac, Riley and Matty shared an amused look. 

Mac couldn’t remember who’d had the idea of going to a karaoke bar, but that’s where the team had been. There’d been some drinking, a lot of singing and even more laughing. Mac rested a shoulder against his living room wall watching Jack jive around his couch and listening to the rustle and scrape of Bozer and Leanna preparing nachos. A gentle beer buzz hummed lazily through him as he watched his friends, leaving him feeling warm, mellow and pleased with the world in general and his family in particular. 

“I’ve been thinking,” Jack announced apropos to absolutely nothing, his beer buzz hitting 6.7 on the Richter scale rather than being at a soft purr like Mac’s, “you know those rides you get outside stores? The ones for kids that are shaped like motorbikes or horses that move about when you put a quarter in them? Someone should make some big enough for adults to use. It’s a sad when you grow too big to go on them. You could make one,” Jack pointed at Mac, “couldn’t you?” 

“I’ll get onto it first thing in the morning, Jack.” 

  


Mac came back to himself with a jolt. The cough that followed his gasp of shock hurt, and the deep breath he drew in at the end of the cough was weak and inadequate. 

The trip to the karaoke bar had been the last one the team had all gone on together before Jack had left to search for Kovacs. Mac had just begun to really think about the consequences of his relationship with Nasha - what their being together would mean for her, what it would be like for him to never feel she was completely safe and the toll the distance between them would take. He’d wanted a break from the noisy clamour inside his head and a night in a place full of a completely different kind of commotion was just what he’d needed. 

He pushed himself to sit upright with his back against the wall beside him and picked up the crumbled hundred dollar bill he’d dropped. Gritting his teeth, Mac concentrated on making another crane. 

Fold. Turn. Fold. Turn. 

His hands were clumsy and uncertain. 

Fold… Fold… Mac’s limbs shook and sweat gathered at the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades. 

His grandfather’s had developed breathing problems in the last year's of his life. Mac’s memories of that time were of the puff of an inhaler and the way his grandpa had hunched forwards with his hands rubbing his thighs as he fought to draw air into his lungs. Mac’s breathing sounded the way his grandfather’s had back then, the laboured wheeze of his inhale and thin rasp of his exhale were just like his grandpa’s had been when Mac had started to truly understand that he was dying. 

Fold - or was it turn? 

Mac blinked sweat away from his eyes. Sweat was stinging his eyes, Mac thought stubbornly, not tears. 

His head throbbed in time with his racing heartbeat and Mac found his surroundings drifting away again. 

  


“Nacho, Nacho man.” Jack claimed a plate of the nachos Bozer had made to himself and laid down next to the fire pit to eat them. “I want to be...” he managed to fit a handful of cheese covered chips into his mouth while supine on the wooden deck, muffling the rest of the line he’d been singing to the relief of everyone around him. 

Riley sucked a string of melted cheese off her thumb and turned to Matty. “You nailed that Alanis Morissette song when it was your turn to have the microphone, boss. The whole bar was with you.” 

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Bozer said. “Seeing a room full of women scream along with You Oughta Know like it was a call to arms was more than a little intimidating.” 

“Awesome, Boze.” Riley corrected. “The word you are looking for is ‘awesome’.” 

“You were popular too.” Matty told Bozer. “Everyone was singing along with you.” 

“That’s because Torn is a modern classic that everyone knows the words to.” 

“It’s a little pop-y for my tastes,” Jack offered between bites. “But the girl who sings it, Natalie Imbroglio? Natalie Embryo? Natalie Embrooooog…anyway, she's a fox. You can’t beat my song, though.” 

“Satisfaction certainly raised the roof.” Mac smiled at the memory of watching every pair of hands in the bar wave in the air as Jack sang. 

“You can’t go wrong with The Stones, dude.” 

“You didn’t get up to sing.” Riley turned to Mac, eyebrows raised, phrasing her statement as a question. 

“Well,” Mac held up his hands in a gesture of defeat, “how could compete with what you guys did on stage?” 

Riley hummed, “That’s true, I did kill it as Beyoncé.” 

“Do you know what I think?” Jack’s brow was lined with thought and his hand had stilled with a chip raised halfway to his mouth. “If someone can be ruthless shouldn’t it also be possible that they can be ruthful? Shouldn’t that be a real word?” 

“I suppose so,” Matty replied, “that’s logical. I don’t know if you’ll find that word in the dictionary though.” 

“Then I’m going to write to the dictionary guys in the morning and suggest they add it.” Jack said. 

“I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to hear from you.” 

  


Mac woke curled on the floor, a hundred dollar bill crushed in his hand. He tried to sit up but an intense wave of nausea knocked him down. 

He lay on his side looking up at the white walls around him hating how clinical and stark the room was. It was soulless and devoid of humanity, nothing in the harsh space was designed for people, everything was hard and cold, meant for hard, cold things that didn’t live or breathe or feel. 

Mac didn’t mind dying alone, everyone dies alone...who said that, Mac wondered, it was a quote, not by Shakespeare but he was sure he’d heard is somewhere... but he hated being helpless. He’d always figured that when his time came it would be in a flare of heat or a hail of bullets as he was fighting to defend himself or protect someone else. Dying while powerless and impotent was gutting. He hated that his friends would have to find him twisted, grey and spent, sprawled on the floor like a broken thing. He didn’t want that to be the last time they saw him or to be the way they remembered him. 

Tear, definitely tears, leaked out of his eyed and rolled along his cheeks to drip onto the floor. 

Mac looked at the useless, creased paper in his hand “makes the world go round, the world go round, the world….”

  


“Does anyone want another drink?” Bozer asked. 

The rest of the team muttered that they didn’t and then fell into a companionable hush that stretched out comfortably between them as they dwelled on their own thoughts. 

“I had a good time tonight.” Riley eventually said. 

“Me too.” Mac told her.

“I’m glad.” Riley smiled at Mac, a perceptive tilt to her head and understanding in her eyes. 

“I’ve been thinking.” Jack said. “If an occasional table is only occasionally a table what is it the rest of the time?” 

A stunned silence followed this question as everyone considered it. 

  


The marble floor under Mac’s cheek had been warmed by his body heat. It was hard and uncomfortable but he couldn’t summon the strength to shift into a more forgiving position. Breathing didn’t even feel like breathing anymore, it was like drowning, each breath drawing the poison around him into his lungs. 

He hadn’t wanted to climb onto the stage that night in the karaoke bar. He hadn’t wanted to stand out, he’d wanted to be part of the crowd and watch people enjoy themselves, letting their happiness flow over and through him, carrying him along on a tide of camaraderie and fun. He’d wanted feel connected and encompassed. And he had. It had been good. Comforting. 

There was a thump on the safe door. Then another, the second one was louder than the first and caused the floor beneath Mac to shudder. There was a third thump, the door of the safe lurched open and Desi and Riley ran through it. 

“Mac!” Riley called, dropping to her knees beside him. “Mac? Are you okay? Here.” A mask covered his mouth and cool, clean oxygen hissed into it. Mac took a greedy breath and coughed at the sudden rush in his lungs, arching up off the floor. 

“Easy, it’s okay.” Riley’s hand brushed the hair from his forehead and rested on his brow. “Take it nice and slow, you’re okay.” 

“You...?” Mac said when the spasm ended, reaching up blindly with a hand. 

“We’ve got you, MacGyver.” Desi gripped his hand with her own and squeezed his fingers so he could feel her touch. “We’ve got you.” 

  


Conversations mellowed into a tired silence. The team found themselves sharing sighs and weary stretches. 

Matty and Riley shared a cab home and Bozer and Leanna wandered off to go bed. Just Mac and Jack were left around the fading orange light of the fire pit. 

“Do you know what I think?” Jack asked and Mac turned to him in hopeful expectation of the new and curious idea Jack was about to come out with. 

“It’s fine that you didn’t want to sing tonight, bro,” Jack said. “Sometimes you want to be the front man but sometimes you want to be part of the band and that’s fine, it’s all part of making the music. As long as you’re feeling the beat in your bones and enjoying the melody then it’s all good. You felt it, right?” Jack looked up to meet Mac’s eyes. “The vibe? The flow? You were part of the groove?” 

“I was part of the groove.” 

“And you got what you needed?” 

“I did.” 

“Then it’s all good.” Jack reached out, flapping his hand in Mac’s direction and missing his mark twice before managing to pat Mac on the knee. “Good. I’m glad, brother.” 

“Thanks, man.” Mac said, oddly touched by Jack’s insight. “Listen, I’m exhausted. I’m going to go to sleep. You’re welcome to stay if you want, the spare room is-”

“I’d rather stay right here.” Jack stretched out on the wooden deck. “I can lie back in the evening air and look up at the stars.” 

“The stars aren’t visible tonight, there’s too much light pollution.” 

“I know that they’re there though and that’s enough.” 

Mac fetched a blanket and pillow from the lounge and dropped them next to Jack. “Here, these might make stargazing a little more comfortable.” 

“Thanks.” Jack wiggled to get more comfortable on the floor and tucked the pillow under his head, then he folded his hands over the blanket resting on his chest and sighed, long, heavy and with contentment. 

Mac watched a glowing ember drift up from the cinders of the fire pit and float upwards into the dark sky. He couldn’t see the stars but knew they were there and he found that that really was enough. 

“Good night, Jack.” Mac turned and walked to the house, his footsteps a soft tread on the wooden floor. As he reached the steps going into down into the kitchen he heard a quiet voice behind him. 

“Nacho, nacho man…”

**Author's Note:**

> Desi and Mac are singing Money Makes the World Go Round from Cabaret. Jack is singing ‘Nacho Man’ to the tune of Macho Man by The Village People. The singer of the song Torn that Jack was trying to remember is Natalie Imbruglia  
There is a Japanese legend that if you fold 1000 cranes – which according to Wikipedia is known as a senbazuru – you will be granted a wish by the Gods. Also according to Wikipedia the Japanese space agency, JAXA, ask candidates applying to be astronauts to fold 1000 cranes. I love that little factoid 
> 
> I must give a nod to the wonderful Violetvaira for Jack’s ruthless/ruthful question. We were having a conversation in the comments of her wonderful story [Up on the Fridge ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18626875) where we were talking about if things can be worthless can they be worthful and if they can be reckless can they be reckful and I said I’d have to include that in a story one day.  
*Nods*


End file.
